Missionary, Go Home

Hannah Waits, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University, will investigate Hannah Waits, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University, will investigate how changes to global missionary work shaped American evangelicals’ understandings of themselves and their growing national and international influence in the second half of the twentieth century. Missionary work has long been a framework through which white actors tried to save and develop those whom they perceived to be others — racial others, cultural others, religious others, or moral others. This project asks how changes to that framework produced new lessons about race, diversity, and power for white evangelicals back in the US.